The idea for this book arose out of a graduate seminar paper written at
Princeton University in 1981 on the system of alternate attendance (sankin kotai). In carrying out that research, I was impressed by the amount
of movement on Tokugawa roads and imagined how colorful life on
them must have been. George Tsukahira's monograph, Feudal Control in
Tokugawa Japan: The Sankin Kotai System, provided the inspiration for
that paper and thus this book owes him a great intellectual debt. The fact
that I have since then returned to the subject in my current research only
reveals the depth of that debt.
Sitting in a comfortable seat on board the "bullet" train in Japan today,
speeding from Tokyo to Kyoto, the modern traveler perhaps has little
reason to stop and consider what the same journey was like for people
living more than a century and a half ago during the Tokugawa, or early
modern period (16oo-x868). Feet inclined, sipping a soft drink or beer
purchased from one of the young women who push refreshment carts
down the aisles, the present traveler's mind is no doubt far from thoughts
of the weariness that his earlier counterparts experienced trudging over
almost the same route by foot or being jostled about in the cramped
quarters of a palanquin. As the train crosses a bridge spanning a normally shrunken river, such as the Oi, it is easy to forget the fear that
gripped those who were carried across the raging river on wooden platforms or pick-a-back.
Whereas the passenger on board the bullet train speeds to his destination, perhaps forgetting to look out the window to view Mount Fuji
or other sites of natural beauty, in earlier times it was the trip itself, not
just the destination, that often drove people to leave the comforts of
home in spite of the accompanying hardships. Moreover, the freedom
of movement that is enjoyed today as a constitutional right was much
more circumscribed in that earlier period.